This article defines, operationalizes, and illustrates the value ofanalytic eclecticismin the social sciences, with a focus on the fields of comparative politics and international relations. Analytic eclecticism is not an alternative model of research or a means to displace or subsume existing modes of scholarship. It is an intellectual stance that supports efforts to complement, engage, and selectively utilize theoretical constructs embedded in contending research traditions to build complex arguments that bear on substantive problems of interest to both scholars and practitioners. Eclectic scholarship is marked by three general features. First, it is consistent with an ethos of pragmatism in seeking engagement with the world of policy and practice, downplaying unresolvable metaphysical divides and presumptions of incommensurability and encouraging a conception of inquiry marked by practical engagement, inclusive dialogue, and a spirit of fallibilism. Second, it formulates problems that are wider in scope than the more narrowly delimited problems posed by adherents of research traditions; as such, eclectic inquiry takes on problems that more closely approximate the messiness and complexity of concrete dilemmas facing “real world” actors. Third, in exploring these problems, eclectic approaches offer complex causal stories that extricate, translate, and selectively recombine analytic components—most notably, causal mechanisms—from explanatory theories, models, and narratives embedded in competing research traditions. The article includes a brief sampling of studies that illustrate the combinatorial potential of analytic eclecticism as an intellectual exercise as well as its value in enhancing the possibilities of fruitful dialogue and pragmatic engagement within and beyond the academe.

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This article calls for the accommodation of eclectic modes of scholarship in international relations that trespass deliberately and liberally across competing research traditions with the intention of defining and exploring substantive problems in original, creative ways. The article first outlines a pragmatist view of social knowledge in which intellectual progress is understood as expanding the possibilities for dialogue and creative experimentation. It elaborates on the definition of analytic eclecticism, identifying its distinctive characteristics and payoffs vis-à-vis those of preexisting research traditions. It then considers a small sample of scholarship in international relations that illustrates the meaning and value of analytical eclecticism with specific reference to issues of international security and political economy. It concludes that alongside, and in dialogue with scholarship produced in specific research traditions, analytic eclecticism is a necessary and valuable asset in enabling the discipline of international relations to evolve beyond recurrent metatheoretical debates and to hold forth some promise for having meaningful practical significance beyond the academe.

While acknowledging the many forms and contributions of multi-method research (MMR), we examine the costs of treating it as best practice on the grounds that it reduces method-specific weaknesses and increases external validity for findings. Focusing on MMR that combines some type of qualitative analysis with statistical or formal approaches, we demonstrate that error-reduction and cross-validation are not feasible where methods are not sufficiently similar in their basic ontologies and their conceptions of causality. In such cases, MMR may still yield important benefits-such as uncovering related insights or improving the coding of variables-but these can be readily obtained through collaboration among scholars specializing in single-method research (SMR). Such scholars often set the standards for the application of particular methods and produce distinctive insights that can elude researchers concerned about competently deploying different methods and producing coherent findings. Thus, the unchecked proliferation of multi-method skill sets risks forefeiting the benefits of SMR and marginalizing idiographically-oriented qualitative research that fits less well with formal or quantitative approaches. This would effectively subvert the pluralism that once gave impetus to MMR unless disciplinary expectations and professional rewards are predicated on a more balanced and nuanced understanding of what various forms of SMR and MMR bring to the table.

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